Priest lured kids with food, trial told
IQALUIT, NUNAVUT — A witness at the trial of a former priest accused of child abuse in the North says the one-time cleric used hunger to lure children into sex.
“When I was a child, sometimes we had nothing to eat,” the witness said Wednesday at the trial of Eric Dejaeger. “Mama (her grandmother) would have to leave me there (at the church) so I could eat.”
The witness, who was about eight years old in 1980 when the alleged assault took place in Igloolik, Nunavut, broke down in tears and sighed heavily to compose herself before she could continue her testimony.
She said one night, after Dejaeger fed her, he took her into his bedroom and told her to get undressed.
“I was scared of him,” said the witness, who recalled that the priest was wearing his long black church robe. “He told me not to tell anybody and then he said he was going to do something to me.”
He made her fondle him, then raped her, she said.
The witness said she was bleeding after the assault and Dejaeger took her to the bathroom to clean herself up.
He then placed her on a bedroom couch over which he had carefully spread garbage bags to prevent staining.
The witness said she fled to her home as soon as she could and told her grandmother, a staunch church-goer.
“She beat me up and told me I was lying.”
Other testimony suggested Dejaeger’s assaults were an open secret, at least among the children.
One man told court that Dejaeger used to sit him on his lap, open his zipper and fondle the boy while other children in the room played and coloured Bible pictures.
Several children, said the woman, told their parents what was going on after Dejaeger forced them to watch him having sex with his dog, but no one believed them.
The woman said she did her best to forget what had happened and never spoke of it — even after Dejaeger assaulted her and her friend a second time, sitting the girls on his naked legs and getting them to stroke his groin.
She never ate at the church again.
“I’d rather go hungry than be eating there.”
The Belgian Oblates, the Catholic missionary order that sent Dejaeger to several communities in what is now Nunavut, dismissed him from the priesthood in December 2011.
He remains a member of the congregation.
At the start of his trial, Dejaeger pleaded guilty to eight of the accusations against him, but still faces 69 charges.